19

‘The odds were great; our margins small; the stakes infinite’*

15 SEPTEMBER

It was his sense of history, and genius for timing, that led the Prime Minister to visit 11 Group headquarters on this day. Waterloo had been fought on a Sunday, and much of the heaviest fighting in this battle had been waged on Sundays. Besides, ‘the weather on this day seemed suitable to the enemy,’ he wrote.¹ So the car was called early to the front door of Chequers, and Churchill and his wife stepped into the back.

By the middle of September, the confidence and combat power of Fighter Command, which had been under such stress during the last days of August and first days of September, had been re-established. Pilots and ground crew were like a patient who has fought his way through a near-mortal illness, and to his immense relief and delight has survived, partly because, when there was time to think about it, he was convinced he would do so.

The ruins that were 11 Group’s airfields told of the desperate nature of the fight, and the halt in the bombing of their bases reinforced their sense of satisfaction. Their equipment was on the top line, there was now no longer any threat of shortage of planes, or of De Wilde ammunition, and many of the new pilots had had time to prepare themselves for combat. All were ready and eager for the continuation of the fight.

Across the Channel a different spirit reigned. For well over two months the aircrews of Luftflotten 2 and 3 had been told that victory was just around the corner– just one last great effort! Adlerangriff seemed as distant in time as the French campaign of May, but what a different outcome! Galland himself later wrote:

Failure to achieve any notable success, constantly changing orders betraying lack of purpose and obvious misjudgment of the situation by the Command, and unjustified accusation had a most demoralising effect on us fighter pilots, who were already overtaxed by physical and mental strain.²

The weather was so brilliant and clear, the barometer so high, that a child could predict a fine day, but the Luftwaffe dutifully sent out its pre-dawn Heinkels on weather reconnaissance. One of these was picked up by Denis David (in his pyjamas) and Trevor Jay of 87 Squadron, who shot the machine into the sea before even having a cup of tea, killing one senior and two junior officers and an airman.

In spite of the weeks of combat, Kesselring still did not understand the efficiency of the RAF’s warning system, and especially the clear, early picture of events as they developed provided by the CH and CHL stations. Once again Uxbridge was given pricelessly valuable warning of events over the Pas de Calais, and by 11.00 a.m. it was obvious that a massive attack was threatening.

It was a further half hour, however, before the first enemy forces crossed the coast of Kent; and the success that our squadrons later enjoyed was not least due to the unusually long interval between the first warning of attack and the enemy’s advance. The controller at No. 11 Group not only had sufficient time to couple ten squadrons into wings, he was able to bring in reinforcements from the adjacent Groups before the first German force crossed the coast: in particular the Duxford Wing was airborne at 11.25 a.m. whereas the enemy did not cross until 11.35.³

In turn during this tense late morning, the airfields in all three southern Groups thundered to the sound of Merlins, and more fighters were airborne before noon than at any time in the Battle: the Biggin Hill squadrons at 11.05, Northolt ten minutes later, Kenley, Hendon, Hornchurch and Middle Wallop at 11.20 and the Duxford boys five minutes after that. Five more squadrons joined them before 11.45 a.m. Their patrol altitudes varied from 15,000 to 25,000 feet, and, confirmed in this impression by the cool voice of the controllers, the pilots of all these twenty-one squadrons knew that this was going to be a big day.

Most of this first big Luftflotte 2 formation was from III/KG76 at Beauvais and Cormeilles led by Oberstleutnant Stefan Froelich, with the usual screen of JG3 109s above and on each beam, yellow noses glinting in the sun. Among the pilots was a rarity indeed, a survivor of the Fokker war of 1917–18, who had been appointed official historian to the Luftwaffe and thought he had better see the action himself. He was Professor Hassel von Wedel.

The Herr Professor witnessed early combat from the cockpit of his Me 109 (which was just three times faster than his Fokker straight and level), for twenty Spitfires from Biggin Hill greeted the raid as it crossed the coast and continued to harass the fighters until the first wave of 253 and 504 Squadrons’ Hurricanes came in to deal with the bombers. They did this in an unusual way, head-on in a shallow climb, claiming three of them, and later two 109s.

Others joined in, and in such numbers and with such aggression that it was like gulls mobbing an albatross. Seven more Dorniers were claimed as destroyed before the Duxford Wing, in all its multiple glory, hurled itself into the whirling mêlée. The raid had now entirely broken up over south London, and any idea of the bomb-aimers identifying let alone attacking their assigned target had disappeared, like so many of their own kind.

Bader’s Duxford squadrons claimed no fewer than nineteen more bombers and seven fighters – a greatly exaggerated figure, like most of the others on this day, when so often a gravely damaged machine, already and reasonably claimed by one pilot, was attacked once and perhaps twice more before plunging into the ground or the sea.

George Barclay of 249 Squadron was among the hundred or more pilots who got in among the Dorniers after they had been broken up. ‘We turned and crossed beneath them but the squadron got split up. I followed three of our Hurricanes climbing up on the left of the bombers for a head-on attack, lost patience and turned to do a beam attack on the leader.... I opened fire with more than full deflection and let the Do fly into the bullets like a partridge…. I came back and did a short quarter attack. The Do 215 then broke away from the formation and I saw that the engines were just idling as it glided down. Then about eight of our fighters set on the lame duck about 3,000 feet below me. On landing I claimed this as a “probably destroyed”.^’4

And how many more, one wonders, made a similar claim? Never mind, it was all very different from eight days earlier when the squadron had been torn apart.

For the citizens of London, many intending to take lunch out of doors on this beautiful day, the progress of the battle high above could not be discerned. All they knew was that the sirens had wailed at around 11.30 a.m. and the bombs were raining down, as they had done on almost every night, and sometimes by day, for weeks. Intermittently between the explosions came the distant ripping sound of machine-gun fire. To a woman in an Anderson shelter in the back garden, clutching her two children to her, a bomb was a bomb, whether or not it had been jettisoned by a hastily retreating German bomber, and no matter that the enemy was shortly to crash somewhere in Kent.

The worst hit suburbs were Battersea, Camberwell, Lewisham and Lambeth. ‘Up west’, Sybil Eccles ‘watched a Hun sail over Hyde Park– the guns boom, booming in his wake. A few seconds later he dived and got Buckingham Palace with a loud noise. Poor King and Queen….^’5 In fact, in this third attack one bomb landed on the immaculate lawn to the rear of the Palace and failed to explode, and a second destroyed the Queen’s private apartments. But Their Majesties were, thankfully, not in residence.

Nos 504 and 609 Squadrons were getting in among these intruders with some success. Sergeant Holmes blew one up with such violence that his Hurricane was thrown into an uncontrollable spin and he baled out, landing on the sloping roof of a Chelsea house and then into its open dustbin. The Dornier crew did better, coming down on to the Oval cricket ground, while the major part of their bomber (fortunately with an empty bomb bay) crashed on Victoria Station.

Most of the 109 escort had turned for home, as usual leaving the bombers when they were most vulnerable. But even the ‘snappers’ did not have a clear run. Among those who fell victim to some unidentified Hurricanes was Professor von Wedel, who never even saw his assailant. The veteran managed to keep some sort of control and tried to crash-land on Romney Marsh. He failed to make it and could not entirely miss a farm right ahead: ‘The small farm was occupied by William Daw, who was about to take his family out for a Sunday jaunt in his car. Alice Daw and her four-year-old daughter were waiting in the car that was garaged in a shed when the Messerschmitt came sailing down fast and smashed the building into matchwood, giving the little car a terrific blow that mortally injured Alice Daw and her daughter.^’6

The Professor, after climbing from his smashed Messerschmitt’s cockpit, was found wandering about in a daze with tears in his eyes, trying to apologise for what he had done. The policeman who apprehended him gave the German a strong cup of tea.

No one, not the sweating pilots also drinking mugs of strong tea and eating bully beef sandwiches, nor the armourers feeding in long belts of ammunition, nor the controllers and their staff, the Observer Corps personnel and the anti-aircraft gun crews – no one doubted that the enemy would be back, and almost certainly in greater strength this time.

And so he was. With awful inevitability, the plots began to grow in the sky above France like germs under a microscope. The raids developed into three waves of Dorniers and Heinkels of KG53, KG2 and KG56, 150–200 in all, escorted by twice as many 109s and 110s. This assault formed up much more rapidly than the morning one and was over the coast at around 2 p.m. before the scrambled squadrons had gained sufficient height to deal with it.

Then, mysteriously, the bombers began circling and reforming high above Maidstone and Sevenoaks, almost as if they had lost their nerve and might turn for home. In fact, there was probably some mix-up with the rendezvous with the 109s of Galland’s JG26 and Trautloft’s JG54 – and not for the first time. While this armada wallowed about the sky, almost invisible from the ground, 11 and 10 Group fighters strained for altitude, and Bader’s Duxford Wing moved south at full speed.

These bomber formations took thirty minutes to cover the sixty miles from the coast to their targets in south and east London. Well over 150 Hurricanes and Spitfires fell on the formations over the southern suburbs of the city. At first, while the 109s still had fuel enough in their tanks to fight, the defenders had great difficulty in penetrating to the bombers.

Bader and his men came on the scene again, along with six more 11 Group and two 10 Group squadrons, just as the 109s were withdrawing and the bombers, still in tight formation, were approaching their targets. The impact was like that of artillery against a cavalry charge. But this was no ‘six hundred’ and these sorely tried Luftwaffe pilots, brave men as they were, showed no interest in ‘the jaws of Death’. A few put their bombs roughly as intended before retreating, but mostly the 100 and 250 kg bombs were again jettisoned on the unfortunate population of the southern London suburbs.

No one was more decisively aware of the turn of the tide in the progress of the Battle than Group Captain Stanley Vincent, Northolt’s station commander, who seized a spare Hurricane and got into the combat zone before it was all over. He reported making a head-on attack on eight Dorniers which had managed to cling together, and then to his amazement added that they had broken up and zoomed away south, flat out for France.

Bobby Oxspring of 66 Squadron recalled: ‘Every squadron in 11 Group had intercepted, and at that moment I saw Douglas Bader’s wing of five squadrons coming in from Duxford. That was the day Goering had said to his fighters the RAF was down to its last fifty Spitfires.* But they’d run up against twenty-three squadrons for a start, when they were on their way in, and then, when they got over London, with the Messerschmitt 109s running out of fuel, in comes Douglas Bader with sixty more fighters….^’7

Oxspring, among many other pilots, claimed a Dornier that day. Another was C. A. W. ‘Boggle’ Bodie, also of 66, who was credited with four. One of them had a long and tragic end: both engines done for, rear gunner baled out and, on close examination of the cockpit, the pilot dead at the controls. The other gunner tried to bale out through the belly hatch, got stuck half-way and, as the glide steepened towards the ground, struggled more and more frantically, losing his shoes and then his socks. At 1,000 feet with the imminent prospect of seeing this gunner ‘cut in half like cheese on a grater’, Bodie put his sights on where the body would be and gave a burst. The white feet were still. ‘I didn’t feel particularly jubilant,’ he confessed.⁸

In the afternoon of this historic day, forever commemorated as Battle of Britain day, Sperrle sent in another small raid to Portland, as if showing he was doing his bit. A few of the remaining Spitfires left in 10 Group knocked down one bomber and damaged another. Anti-Aircraft Command had its finest victory later this day, too. Recognising once more the vital importance of the Woolston Supermarine works at Southampton, Erpro 210 made a low-level attack just before 6 p.m. There was not an RAF fighter in sight, and the gunners knew it was up to them. Though they did not shoot one of the fighter-bombers down, the fire was so hostile and accurate that not a bomb hit the factory.

Like front-line soldiers in a great land attack, it was the Fighter Command pilots who were first to learn of their own victory. You could not, like Bodie, destroy four twin-engined bombers, or, like Vincent, witness the frantic break up and retreat of a whole Staffel of Dorniers in the face of a single Hurricane, without recognising that this day was different, that something had cracked in the fighting eagerness of the bomber crews who had pressed on so manfully against heavy opposition for so many weeks.

One of Group Captain Vincent’s combat reports.

Every one of Bader’s sixty pilots had witnessed the stunning impact of their two attacks; every pilot who had looked down over the Weald of Sussex and the hop fields and orchards of Kent and counted the fires of crashed planes, like warning beacons addressed to the German High Command; and every Hurricane and Spitfire pilot who had earlier witnessed those orderly mass armadas of bombers and fighters heading north for the capital, and then seen the consequence of their own mass attacks – all knew by late afternoon that they had participated in a great victory.

For those on the ground – the WAAFs in the ops rooms and the ground crews down at the dispersals awaiting the return of their planes – the news was delayed. In sector and Group ops rooms, and at Bentley Priory itself, much anxiety was experienced before it became clear that the day had gone well.

Churchill, who had been standing beside Park observing every move of the battle, watching the colour of the lights change as squadrons were brought to readiness, were scrambled and changed to red ‘in action’, watching the raid counters, ‘twenty plus’, ‘sixty plus’, moving across the big map board, at length ‘became conscious of the anxiety of the commander, who now stood still behind his subordinate’s chair. Hitherto,’ Churchill recalled, ‘I had watched in silence. I now asked, “What other reserves have we?” “There are none,” said Air Vice-Marshal Park.* In an account which he wrote about it afterwards he said that at this I “looked grave”. Well I might.^’9

By the time the Prime Minister left to return to Chequers still no overall picture of the outcome of the contest had emerged. It was not until well into the evening that his Principal Private Secretary was able to give him the news: ‘We have shot down one hundred and eighty-three for a loss of under forty.’

It did not matter that the true figure of German losses was one-third of this claim; the Germans usually multiplied by four. It did not matter that London had still to suffer more daylight bombing. And in the strict terms of historic and strategic significance, it mattered not at all that London and many provincial cities were to suffer a winter-long ordeal by fire and high-explosive.

What did matter was that the Kampfgeschwader could no longer rely on the protection of their escort, and the crews’ will to fight on had been broken. What mattered was that Galland, Trautloft and their pilots, as well as the bomber crews, had fought almost daily in foreign skies, with a Channel crossing at the end, for more than two months, and still had to experience the mass attack of more than 300 enemy fighters: it was all too much.

And what mattered most of all was that within forty-eight hours, Hitler had issued the signal which indefinitely ‘postponed’ the invasion of Britain.

Only retrospectively can it be recognised that the Battle of Britain was won on 15 September 1940. Many more of ‘the few’ would die, along with victims of bombing on the ground, before, with shortening days and autumn weather, the daylight ordeal would at last end.

* Winston Churchill on this day.

* A slight exaggeration!

* If this was true, Park might have been dramatising the situation for the Prime Minister. Other squadrons from 12 Group could have been drawn into the battle.